For the last 50 years, liberalism as a movement of moral liberation, has preached “if you like your morality, you can keep your morality.” The game was to promise a limited reform that would seriously not disturb the status quo while pushing changes that had revolutionary consequences.
Liberals, embracing the sexual revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, began preaching a message of sexual liberation – anything between consenting adults was none of society’s business. There would be no decisive change, no radical alteration to the nation’s way of life – just a little “loosening up” with regard to sex. Conservatives of that era warned that the little “loosening up” would erode all traditional sexual morality, family values, and legislation based upon them, but they were disregarded to such an extent that the America of 1964 would not recognize the America of 2014.
Perhaps the liberals of that era did not acknowledge all the consequences of what they were doing because they themselves may not have fully understood them. Or more likely, they were lying about the ultimate result while laying the groundwork for the long range destruction of traditional morality and values.
When the Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) stuck down Texas’s statute prohibiting homosexual sodomy, the Court’s opinion, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, went out of its way to assure the nation that the case had nothing to do with the question of same-sex marriage. In dissent, Justice Scalia, seeing through the Court’s “bald disclaimer” to the actual tendency of its reasoning, bluntly told the country: “do not believe it.”
And events proved Scalia right. The ink was hardly dry on the Court’s opinion before state courts began using Lawrence to invalidate state laws defining marriage between a man and woman. And in the 2013 Windsor ruling, just ten years after his Lawrence disclaimer, Justice Kennedy himself showed his inclination to use Lawrence’s reasoning to move toward creating a right to same-sex marriage, making it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Lawrence was just one step in the larger project of sexual liberation by means of constitutional law.
A similar lack of candor can be seen in the argument over same-sex marriage itself. One point commonly made by opponents is that the argument for it, an argument that typically appeals to the autonomy of love, and emphasizes the right to equal recognition for all forms of love, is indistinguishable from an argument for abolishing any objective definition of marriage. Accordingly, same-sex marriage could not be the stopping point of sexual liberation, which would then have to go on and demand a normalization of polygamy.
Proponents of same-sex marriage typically respond to this argument by treating it as outlandish and acting as if no normal person could hold any such development in serious contemplation. And yet, some liberal activists are already beginning to argue for the legitimacy of polygamy.
After polygamy, what will the left’s new frontier of sexual liberation embrace? Lowering the age of consent that NAMBLA and pedophiles want? Making prostitution legal? Normalizing adult incest or sex with animals? No one can say!
It is both troubling and galling that we are at the end of a fifty-year fraud that has been perpetrated on us in relation to some of the most important things in human life. But even more troubling is the realization that we may still be in the middle of that great fraud; to realize that there are still more consequences to face, now hidden and even denied but nevertheless approaching inexorably with the unfolding of the logic of sexual liberation.
No one can say where sexual liberation will stop because liberalism will not be honest about its ultimate ends, making contemporary sexual liberalism a frightening spectacle. The unchecked progress of sexual liberalism means that we cannot say what kind of moral culture our children will inhabit as adults or, accordingly, what kind of moral culture will form our grandchildren. No responsible person can support such a movement.
Source: Liberalism’s Biggest Lie: If You Like Your Morality, You Can Keep Your Morality, by Carson Holloway, Political Scientist, first published at www.thepublicdiscourse.com
